Police say that a billionaire real estate heiress is so dependent on e-mail that a hacker managed to pose as her and e-mail her secretary to wire $548,625 to bank accounts before anyone wised up. A source told the Post, "[Candia] Fisher relies on e-mails all the time. So it’s easy for someone to learn lots of things about her if they get access to them." more ›

Is Yahoo blocking emails with links to the Occupy Wall Street website? The short answer is yes, sometimes. We were able to send emails through our ancient, all-but-forgotten Yahoo accounts (it's been a while, Chunkylover53@yahoo.com!) but check out this video, which shows someone trying and failing to send an email with the www.occupywallstreet.org url in the body. After clicking send, the user is told: "Your message was not sent. Suspicious activity has been detected on your account. To protect your account and our users, your message has not been sent." Instead, check out this teaser for tonight's new episode of "Raising Hope"! more ›

The Medgar Evers sex scandal gets bigger today, as a second dean named in an anonymous email to the school's top brass speaks out against the claims made in the lurid letter. This time, though, the dean says one of her own colleagues made the offensive comments first. more ›

A CUNY department chair who was fired from the university is going after Yahoo to give up the name of the student who sent scandalous emails to the school's brass. Dr. Zulema Blair claims that she was fired from her job in the Public Administration department of CUNY's Medgar Evers College following an anonymous email from a student claiming she was having sex with students and had a student's baby. more ›

This is our justice system, people According to the Daily News, "A [Queens] judge declared a mistrial in a rape trial after a renegade juror emailed a friend who happens to be a Bronx prosecutor about the contentious deliberations." more ›

April Fools Day can be a stressful day for many, between the Improv Everywhere faux-attack videos and the actually-not-so-ridiculous dog highchairs. It must be especially tough for politicians, who are used to receiving lots of strange mail on a good day. Assembly Democratic Speaker Sheldon Silver was one of a handful of politicians to receive one such rambling, threatening email today, and as with everything today, police weren't sure how seriously to take it. more ›

Is The Dov starting to fight back? American Apparel CEO Dov Charney claims, via his lawyers, that 20-year-old Irene Morales was sending him naughty emails long before she filed a lawsuit against him for $260 million. According to the NY Post, Morales—who claims she was held as his sex slave—"appears more like a money-hungry vixen than a helpless victim" in the emails. more ›

We receive a lot of e-mail (it's okay to be jealous). Most of these missives are carefully read, discussed at length among the editors, and courteously replied to in a timely fashion—except for the ones that are so bizarre and irrelevant that we're simply afraid to engage the person who sent it. But rather than let these more peculiar messages fade into the trash folder, we've decided to share a few of them here (with personal details redacted to maintain the senders' privacy). While we realize that publishing this single-sided correspondence runs the risk of encouraging an avalanche of e-mail from the weird side, some of these are just too strange to keep to ourselves. So fasten your seat belts for a tour of the eccentric underbelly of the Gothamist inbox: more ›

A Michigan man will go on trial next month on hacking charges that are normally leveled at those who break into a government system or private business. Leon Walker's crime? Reading his wife's e-mail on the laptop they shared. Through his snooping, Walker discovered that his wife Clara was now having an affair with her second husband—a guy who was previously arrested for beating her in front of her son. more ›

Kenneth Starr, the accountant to the stars who admitted to running a Ponzi scheme with their money, is in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, emailing away to pass the time. Prosecutors revealed his missives to a "mystery woman" to show that Starr should not be granted bail, because he's a flight risk. Why? Well, his brothers would be putting up most of the bail, but this is what Starr wrote about them, "Once I am sentenced I want no contact with them or anyone in their families... [They] wouldn't help when we needed help - they will need me one day and I will not lift a finger - they are mean spirited awful human beings." more ›

So there's this great game called Facebook, and it's very popular with widget nerds and teachers who want to flirt with their students. But the name of the game this game plays is what-have-you-innovated-for-me-lately, so the company has been working on a top-semi-secret Project Titan, which will take the game to a level at which no game has ever been played before nor will ever be played again. On Monday, the fruits of that project are expected to be unveiled—Facebook will announce their new internet-based email service designed to compete against Gee-mail. The biggest innovation is said to be the "priority inbox," which will undoubtedly improve the way we live in such a way that the way we live now will cease to seem like any sort of way for anyone to ever have lived. more ›

The former University of Tennessee student who successfully hacked into former Alaska governor Sarah Palin's Yahoo! email account during the 2008 election season was sentenced to one year and one day in prison. David Kernell, 20, was convicted this past April; Palin said at the time, "As Watergate taught us, we rightfully reject illegally breaking into candidates’ private communications for political intrigue in an attempt to derail an election." Still, this is great publicity for Sarah Palin's Alaska, the TLC reality show that debuts on Sunday (photos of the hockey mom and family). more ›

International banking giant Goldman Sachs has announced a major overhaul of the way it does business, finally addressing some of the controversial trading practices that earned the company its reputation as a sinister vampire squid. In a now-infamous internal email, Thomas Montag, who helped run Goldman's securities business, described a set of mortgage-linked investments sold by his firm "one shitty deal." Under the new rules, Goldman employees will no longer be allowed to encourage clients to buy into such shitty deals... Oh, wait. Correction: They can still shovel the shit, they just can't use the word shit. "Dookie deals" are presumably permissible. more ›

Yesterday, Gawker found that a "security breach has exposed iPad owners including dozens of CEOs, military officials, and top politicians. They—and every other buyer of the cellular-enabled tablet—could be vulnerable to spam marketing and malicious hacking." But a certain billionaire mayor isn't so concerned! more ›

Sarah Palin on the guilty verdict for the guy who hacked into her Yahoo email account: "America’s elections depend upon fair competition. Violating the law, or simply invading someone’s privacy for political gain, has long been repugnant to Americans’ sense of fair play. As Watergate taught us, we rightfully reject illegally breaking into candidates’ private communications for political intrigue in an attempt to derail an election." more ›

Ahead of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein's visit to the Congress next week, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released emails (PDF) that suggest the firm was making money while the mortgage markets collapsed, which would then contradict the firm's claims it lost money during that period. A November 2007 email from Blankfein said, "Of course we didn’t dodge the mortgage mess. We lost money, then made more than we lost because of shorts." more ›

Even though texting while driving is now illegal, government agencies continue to send text messages to motorists. In what the Daily News calls "an ironic communication breakdown," thousands of New York drivers receive texts about traffic and road conditions from government agencies despite a statewide ban on checking and sending texts while behind the wheel. more ›

Someone attempted to convince Brooklyn Tech students, parents, and teachers that the school was closed until further notice by sending a spoof email using the assistant principal's account. The phony email claimed that a construction accident in the basement had caused "a serious safety hazard for anyone that comes near or inside the school," according to the Times. more ›

The restaurateur who sent out an obscenity-laden missive against his employees last week stands by his angry rant, which he has defended as his food industry version of Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl." Vadim Ponorovsky, owner of the Meatpacking District eatery Paradou, told the Post that he has been receiving death threats because of his email to staffers, which goes something like this: more ›

More than two dozen Park Slope restaurants and cafes owe at least $910,000 in unpaid wages to more than 200 workers, the State Labor Department announced yesterday. Inspections during the spring revealed that some workers made as little as $2.75 an hour; the minimum wage for food service workers is $4.65 per hour. (Today the Daily News revealed that the restaurants include Aunt Suzie’s, Baluchi's, Sotto Voce, Olive Vine Café, and Sweet Melissa Patisserie.) Getting chiseled out of already laughably low wages is rough, but at least they didn't have the misfortune to be employed by Paradou owner Vadim Ponorovsky, who's earned some notoriety today for an incredibly nasty email he sent to staffers at his Meatpacking district restaurant. His gloriously profane and hateful missive, which makes Hunter S. Thompson's letters seem like Get Well Soon cards, is published below in its entirety: more ›

The notoriously Luddite NYPD—they still use typewriters for most paperwork—has a technological visionary in their midst. Though most people know the Internet is just a passing fad, crazy Capt. Kenneth Corey at the 76th Precinct in Brooklyn thinks it should be used to communicate with concerned citizens. So he frequently sends electronic mail, or "e-mail," to a growing subscriber list, informing them of local crime news. But is the NYPD brass going to stand for this? What do they pay spokesman Paul Browne for? more ›

Earlier this year, the current and former owners of a Bronx apartment building whose tenants illegally subdivided their apartments and essentially created a maze that killed two firefighters in 2005, were found guilty of criminally negligent homicide and reckless endangerment. Now defense lawyers are trying to throw out the conviction, because one of the jurors contacted one of the witnesses. Newsday reports, "The social networking site Facebook took center stage in a Bronx courtroom Friday with the unsealing of gushing e-mails from a juror" to firefighter Brendan Cawley, who had testified. Apparently Karen Krell unsuccessfully tried to contact Cawley via Facebook during the trial; she continued to message him—"I'm awed at what you and the others went through, and what you yourself still continue to go through"— until he responded. She wrote, post-trial, to her fellow jurors, "So I finally found Brendon on facebook and we wrote some letters to each other (just about the trial, nothing else!! =( ...LOL)." A defendant's lawyer said, "You're entitled to 12, not 11 unbiased witnesses." more ›

If you're going to discuss South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford's South American wanderings to his married girlfriend, why not enlist the expert insight of another governor whose reign ended when he admitted to an affair with a man—and that he was a "Gay American"? The Today Show snagged former NJ governor James McGreevey to comment about Sanford's mess—clearly, Eliot Spitzer passed. more ›

At a press conference this morning, MTA executive Elliot Sander announced a "major initiative" that will enable the authority to let riders know how hard their commutes are going to suck with text messaging and email alerts in real time. The MTA has been working toward a real-time update system for several years now, starting out with weekly email updates and sporadic advisories on their website. In a statement, Sander said, "This is a revolutionary step that has the potential to transform the experience our customers have with us." more ›

A former library assistant who was arrested in a case of mistaken email identity will receive a little over $25,000 in a settlement with the city. more ›

On the Apple discussion boards, a woman from NJ asked other users if iPhone photos automatically attach themselves to email, after she "found a raunchy picture" her husband sent to a woman via his iPhone: "He admitted that he took the picture but says that he never sent it to anyone. He claims that he went to the Genius Bar at the local Apple store and they told him that it is an i-phone glitch." Most users smell a rat ("this is not an issue with the iPhone so the glitch is probably with your husband.") and wonder about the picture itself. In the midst of the exchange, the aggrieved wife adds, "Well, if you must know ... it was a close-up shot of him pleasuring himself taken at the exact moment of maximum pleasure... Add that picture to the late night phone calls and some other miscellaneous texts and e-mails that I found ... and let's just say that my atty is working on the divorce complaint. Nonetheless, I wanted to remain open to the possibility that it was all some big mistake (I think that he is the big mistake) and thank everyone who provided input on this discussion." more ›

Not everyone losing their shirts these days can blame it on the market collapse; some unlucky investors have broker Michael Axel to blame. Despite his totally boss name, Axel was definitely not the guy to trust with your savings. And he's (allegedly) living proof that people do actually fall for that overseas e-mail scam, whereby someone you don't know, usually residing in Africa, e-mails you with some ridiculous offer that, to paraphrase Michael McDonald, only a fool believes. Axel was that fool, prosecutors say; he was arraigned Thursday on grand larceny and forgery charges and could get 15 years in prison. more ›

One good thing to come from the Sarah Palin Yahoo Mail hack: Other free email users will be resetting their passwords with stronger ones. more ›